Not everyone who helps spin the meth web is from Michoacan, or from Mexico for that matter, and many of them are caught themselves by the drug's grip. And not all of the Central Valley's meth spiders make or sell the finished product. Some are specialists who operate subsidiary enterprises that keep the web operating.

Kevin used to be one of those specialists. Less than a year ago, he was among an elite handful of people in the meth web who knew how to manufacture hydrogen chloride gas, a critical ingredient in large-scale meth cooks.

"I had the Mexicans  coming to me. I had independent cookers who could do five labs at different places," he says. "They needed me."

More precisely, they needed his product. Before Kevin, meth suppliers were forced to travel out of state or to Mexico to fetch the gas and bring it back to California. But Kevin's operation, in the back yard of a small home in Merced County, made better business sense for Valley traffickers -- no travel, no middlemen.

One 5-gallon cylinder of hydrogen chloride gas, Kevin says, would sell for $5,000. One customer paid him $15,000 cash up front; another wanted him to sell to his family exclusively. Contacts would bring him anything he wanted to make sure a deal went through. He had more than a dozen cars and dressed in Wranglers, dress shirts and boots. He never was too flashy. He always was low-key, in control.

Kevin was building refinery tanks in Bakersfield when his marriage fell apart in 1981. He spiraled into a world of all-night binges. A friend gave him pure crystal meth to snort. It was his first hit of "killer dope." Using the stuff cost him jobs in Bakersfield and Fresno. He drifted north to Merced County, eventually parking his trailer next to a house in the tiny town of Ballico.

Still hungry for meth, Kevin dipped into his savings to buy larger quantities. He needed money, so he started a welding service and converted a shed into an office. In a matter of days, the business was serving as a front for drug dealing. One of Kevin's drug-using friends became his "runner" and would buy, on average, 2 pounds of meth a week from Mexican distributors. Kevin never met them face to face; it was his policy.

The front didn't last. One night, Kevin's runner was tipped that agents were planning a raid. Kevin stuffed his dope into a small metal box and hid it behind a piece of broken machinery in a grease puddle. He and his runner left town. Narcotics agents busted in just before midnight. They didn't find the dope or evidence of drug dealing, but they seized hypodermic needles and guns.

"I had an assault rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun, a .41 Magnum, a .45. They also seized a small-caliber handgun. I had the guns to protect myself. When I had a lot of money, people thought they could creep up on me and rob me," Kevin says.

The raid upset Kevin's sense of security. He stopped dealing the next day, transferred his customers to another dealer and retreated back into drug use. But not for long. In the mid-1990s, he noticed that the quality of street meth had degenerated, so he decided to get back into the business as a manufacturer.

He befriended a string of people who knew how to cook and invited them to use his kitchen. Soon he was introduced to other cooks who knew larger-scale cooks who knew chemical suppliers who knew distributors. He met a "friend of a friend" who would bring home buckets of red phosphorus from his workplace, an East Bay chemical plant.

"People used to come to me for anything and everything. I had the connection for red phosphorus, I had iodine crystals here and there, and I had the dope."

He had many contacts, but one would turn small-time Kevin into a big-time player. The contact knew how to produce hydrogen chloride gas. Drug agents were closing in on his contact's operation, and he was looking for another place in another town. They set up shop on the Ballico property.

"The hazards they create not only for themselves but the adjoining property is just tremendous. It's a bomb waiting to happen."

The process to make the gas, Kevin says, is mind-numbingly simple, and the chemicals are available over the counter: "It's amazing. It's about a $100 investment. My return is $5,000." It typically would take two hours to make the gas, even less time after he perfected his technique.

But at first, Kevin made mistakes. The valve on a cylinder got stuck, and pressure started to build. Kevin started to sweat. A few seconds later, the valve shot into the air. A 30-foot-long column of acid and rock salt followed.

"The liquid acid shot clear past the roof of my house and came close to this walnut tree," he says. "Then it started to rain acid. It rained on my house and shop, in the orchard, a little on my head."

Another time, moisture seeped into a cylinder he was preparing to deliver to a customer. He had placed it in the truck bed, then gone back into the house. When he returned, he noticed a dense fog forming. The truck's windows had cracked.

"Mexican field-workers were trimming the trees, and this cloud just kept on getting bigger and bigger, and there was nothing I could do to stop it." The cloud mushroomed into the size of a small house, drifted through the orchard and rolled over the workers.

Mishaps in the lab were rare. But just as business started to boom, a partner became Kevin's undoing.

The partner and his girlfriend moved into Kevin's home, and they fought constantly. Kevin repeatedly warned them to calm down lest they jeopardize the business by drawing attention to the house. One night, an argument spilled into the front yard, so Kevin told his partner to leave. The man packed his supplies and left the next morning in one of Kevin's 13 vehicles, a Ford Galaxy. He drove less than a quarter mile east when he stopped the car.

Around 8:30 a.m. Aug. 25, 1999, Merced County deputies received a report of a suspicious person near a Ballico intersection. The man was rummaging through items in the back seat of the car when a deputy arrived. He agreed to a search. Glassware, tubes and other equipment used to manufacture meth were found in the trunk.

Narcotics agents were contacted, and Kevin's partner gave him up. Authorities found about 20 gas canisters, air conditioning pumps, rock salt and sulfuric acid on the property. Kevin was arrested; a chemical buyer at the house was questioned, then released.

"They thought they had a real wizard when they busted me," says Kevin, who was sentenced to five years' felony probation and mandatory drug rehabilitation. "The day I got busted, I would have made $30,000."

Rick McIntyre was a recreational drug user for 20 years, dabbling in cocaine and marijuana. He held a good job as the operations manager of a trucking firm. He had a wife and a house in Fowler in Fresno County on property his parents owned.

But early in 1997, at age 43, McIntyre started snorting crank. He kept his wife and job, but his habit was costing him a lot of money. So he started dealing.

He started with ounces, buying from a man he had known for years. Business was good, so he moved up to pounds. His friends had contacts with a group from Michoacan, so they began to deliver a pound at a time to an orange grove near Sanger in Fresno County -- fourth tree from the road.

McIntyre paid $4,600 for a pound, then sold it by the ounce to street dealers for $500 each. Sixteen ounces at $500 per comes to $8,000 a pound. In theory.

Reality, however, varied from theory. McIntyre "fronted" the dope to some dealers, who then failed to pay him back. His own meth use skyrocketed. Profits dwindled. He started to skid. In one 19-day stretch, he didn't sleep.

Despite the lack of rest, however, he remained cautious. He sold only to people he knew personally, friends. "I mean they were dope friends," McIntyre explains. "Once I got in trouble, they didn't want to talk to me."

Through his addiction, McIntyre remained a reliable customer to the men from Michoacan. They were intrigued with the property he lived on -- a large plot on a dead-end street, accessible only through an electronic gate -- a cooker's paradise. So in December 1997, they made a deal. They would cook in a barn a few hundred feet behind McIntyre's house and pay him a weekly rent of $40,000. They gave him a $6,000 down payment.

McIntyre told his wife they were using the barn to "chop up" stolen cars. The Michoacan men set up a super lab capable of making 100 pounds a cook. In a week, they made up to 400 pounds. McIntyre got only a pound.

Soon after the lab began operations, drug enforcement agents acting on a tip from a money-jealous relative busted the lab and arrested McIntyre. The cooking crew wasn't on the property when the bust went down and got away. McIntyre hired a high-priced lawyer and, after a month served, got probation.

Now, he says, he sometimes reflects on the damage the dope he sold may have caused. Maybe his customers ended up in prison. Maybe they became violent and hurt someone. Maybe they exposed their kids to the ugly web of meth. But when he was dealing, he says, he thought he was doing them a favor.

"I was providing a service. I was in the commodities business," he rationalizes. "It was like people need their sugar, their coffee, their meth."